Lori Roberts' Career Path Focuses On Family
Lori Danello Roberts cherishes being a work-at-home mother “because I see everywhere a battle between working moms and stay-at-home moms, and I get to be in the middle of that and couldn’t be more thrilled.”
At FSU she refined her graphic arts skills, but she grew impatient with theory and wanted to set her hands to work on her personal vision.
As graduation neared, she took her portfolio and set about to find her first professional job. With lightning speed she was an associate at John Koske Advertising, soon rising to partner, owning half the business that went on to absorb longtime Tallahassee studio Rapidographics.
It did not take Roberts long to put her stamp on the business, refining Rapidographics’ work processes and building a creative environment based on teamwork.
Rapidographics soon was producing most Florida association magazines.
“You could literally drive through downtown and every association office you saw we were doing their magazine.”
That all changed when family therapist Jeff Liang sought help with Tallahassee Parent magazine. Roberts went to work upgrading the design — and developing a passion for the magazine’s service to families.
The print-broadcast combination was hugely successful in increasing the magazine’s readership. But finances remained a problem.
“I am no salesman,” Roberts said. “I can talk all day long about why Family Forum is fantastic, but I can’t say, ‘Now where’s my check.’”
“I was pouring money into it every month,” Roberts remembers. “But I fell in love with who I was with this magazine.”
And readers fell in love with the magazine.
“One night at 9:30 a man called me,” Roberts remembers. “He said, ‘You’ve changed my life. I just got home from work, and my daughter had left your magazine open on my bed.’”
It was an article about workaholic dads.
Forum’ s life-changing character has now migrated to the Web as well in the form of tallymoms.com, a site dedicated to parent information and dialogue.
By now a mother on her way to three daughters, Roberts stayed at home and with the project. Along the way she has given freely of her talents groups like the Tallahassee Ballet, Young Actors Theatre, Whole Child Leon, Treats for Teens and dozens of other charities and nonprofits. Her most recent effort is the quest to make Raa Middle School (where she was a student and her oldest daughter now attends) a performing-arts magnet school.
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